Bloated in Graceland

Here's a trade secret, known only to television reviewers. When we are first appointed to our solemn task, we are ceremonially issued with a special pair of critics' slippers (handmade in Turkey), with spiralling tips that are essential for those moments when we experience chronic toe-curling in the course of our professional duties.

Oddly, mine get most wear-and-tear whenever Cliff Richard appears inside the magic rectangle, not least when his Millennium song, A Prayer For Our Time, ruined my New Year with its disgusting litany of bestial perversions: "Our Father Who Art in Hen", "Deliver Us from Eel".

My toes achieved a curve of 270 degrees on the day Our Lady Of A Cappella sang at Wimbledon in the rain, and the full 360 degrees occurred when I saw televised excerpts from his disastrous stage musical Heathcliff. I've since heard rumours that he's planning a follow-up called Hampstead Heath Cliff, but I somehow doubt it, because that show would really suck.

He started his career by shamelessly ripping off Elvis Presley, and how I wish he'd continued in that vein. Had he done so, he'd have become vastly overweight and died on the thunderbox aged 42, his posthumous career would then have rocketed and he'd now be referred to as "a bit of a cult", instead of as the increasingly absurd Peter Pan of Pop.

The total cessation of life may seem like a drastic career move, but it worked splendidly for the likes of Marc Bolan and Jim Morrison, but above all, it really did the trick for Elvis, who was the subject of last night's Rock Shrines.

I mean, can you imagine what the King would be doing today, were he still alive? Apart from scratching frantically at his coffin lid, of course.

This ingenious little programme visited Graceland in Tennessee, to witness last August's anniversary of Elvis's death, an event that still attracts some 30,000 (mostly) white-trash fans.

They're the US equivalent of the sort of British people who took months to come down from Planet Diana in 1997, mostly Southern menopausal women whose chief pleasure in life is wild and unrestrained public grieving, closely followed by getting smashed, tattooed, and laid (if possible, all at the same time). As for the men, they were homely, middle-aged Elvis look-unalikes who had, for obvious reasons, all chosen to impersonate him during his later obese and gluttonous period, rather than during his early years when he was a slim, handsome, and charismatic performer, much given to lewd and vigorous pelvic thrusts (which, doubtless, would have dislocated the ageing impersonators' plastic hips, had they been unwise enough to emulate them).

Yes, the early Elvis was the King all right, and (in his own way) so was the Elvis of the mid-Seventies. He was the Burger King.

The programme made no editorial comment whatsoever about the boorish display we were witnessing, but simply showed the footage and allowed juxtaposition to speak eloquently on its behalf.

"Elvis shopped here on his way to Howard's Donuts", proclaimed a proud neon sign outside a Memphis liquor store, while tributes from fans seemed equally food-related, such as the curious legend, "We love you Elvis. You are one hunk of burning Oxo."

OK, none of us will be at our best at the moment of our death, but there was something positively myopic about the way the crowds celebrated only the early Elvis, and had wilfully erased from their consciousness the later bloated years, and their hero's ignominious demise on the carsey. If they talk of it at all, I suspect that they regard it as some sort of glorious literary death, with Elvis straining too hard at a full colon, and ending up at a full stop.

Throughout the world, people seem to love nothing better than gathering together to conjure up ghosts and cry themselves happy, and Rock Shrines is a clever format that will doubtless thrill and please smitten fans, while quietly delighting the rest of us with its depiction of the neverending folly of mankind.

Yes, it's hard for any of us to avoid being a laudator temporis acti from time to time, and many take refuge in the past because their present is unbearable and the future bleak, but there was something unforgivably undignified about this gathering of crapulent men, who mostly looked like triplets sharing a single head, and vacuous women for whom fruit-flavoured condoms were their sole source of Vitamin C.